Introduction

Can you believe it? It's been almost four years that AnandTech has been up
and running online. It has always been overwhelming to think about where we
came from and where you all, our readers, have helped us go. You've taken what
started out as an idea on a Geocities page to an online magazine with a circulation
of just under 3 million people. Saying thanks is the absolute least we can
do, but keeping AnandTech and the Forums a place where you can continue to come
to for entertainment, enjoyment and education is definitely something that you
all deserve.

We have been experiencing tremendous growth at AnandTech over the past few
months. Traffic has more than doubled since we made our major server upgrade
in August of last year, however until recently we were running on a relatively
unchanged server setup. In order to cope with the increase in traffic we had
to plan out yet another server upgrade, however this time around the situation
was much more complicated. Our software load balancing solution that was used
to make sure that you all would get put on the servers with the least amount
of load at any given time was unfortunately showing its flaws and resulted in
quite a few undesirable side effects. At the same time we ran into an unfortunate
bug with a few of our server boards, proving that long-term real world use is
the best test of reliability we can offer.

Without further ado, let's take a look at the issues we encountered, how we
dealt with them, and what the new AnandTech Server Setup looks like.